Just in time for the big iPad 3 reveal, Adobe has followed through on its promise to add an iOS 5 version of its tablet-friendly Adobe Photoshop Touch app. The company announced its first six touchscreen-optimized apps—including Adobe Photoshop Touch for Android—back in October of last year, and promised to add iPad-compatible versions by early 2012. Well, here we are in early 2012, and sure enough, the first of the iOS apps is now downloadable for $9.99 in the iTunes App Store: Adobe Photoshop Touch for the iPad 2. New iPad versions of the other five Adobe Touch apps (Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, and Proto) will be coming out later this year.

The new version is essentially the same as the Android version, offering the ability to combine photos into layered images and use finger gestures to control familiar Photoshop tools and effects. As with the Android version, connectivity to the Internet plays a big role, with Google searching and Facebook image sharing directly from within the app. In fact, Google Image Search and Facebook are both seamlessly integrated as sources for image browsing and acquisition. Additionally, you can view, share, and sync images across multiple computing devices using the Adobe Creative Cloud hub.

With built-in tutorials and a relatively intuitive interface, Photoshop Touch provides a truly full-fledged image editing application (within the hardware limitations of a tablet, of course) and adds some nice tablet-specific enhancements (such as the Scribble Selection Tool for masking out background images). To get a really great overview of the product, check out the Adobe Photoshop Touch videos on the Adobe TV site, especially the great tutorials by Russell Brown, Senior Creative Director at Adobe, such as the Scribble Tool tutorial.

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